Monday, December 03, 2012

Stuart Shieber
is the Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, Faculty
Co-Director of the Berkman
Center for Internet and Society,
Director of Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC), and
chief architect of the Harvard Open Access (OA) Policy — a 2008 initiative that has seen Harvard
become a major force in the OA movement.

When
in 1989 Stuart Shieber became a Harvard faculty member he was, for reasons he
never fully understood, appointed to a series of library committees. Whatever
the reason for his appointment, it was to prove an educational experience: As
he sat through the various committee meetings, Shieber began to see the world
through the lens of the library, a perspective that led him to the inevitable
conclusion that there was something amiss in the world of scholarly
communication.

Stuart Shieber

As
he puts it, “[I]t became increasingly clear to me that some of the problems
that libraries faced in dealing with providing access to the scholarly
literature were not library problems per se, but rather, problems in how the
scholarly communication systems are set up.”

This
is worth noting because when researchers face difficulties accessing scholarly
journals they tend to assume that something has gone awry in the library, not
that there is a fundamental flaw in the way research is communicated.

It
was only in sitting through all those library committee meetings that Shieber came
to realise the research community had a serious problem on its hands, a problem
moreover that could only be expected to get worse unless action was taken. And it
was clear to Shieber that researchers themselves would need to play their part
in resolving the problem.

Stated
simply, the problem is this: When researchers publish their papers, they
routinely sign over the commercial exploitation rights in them to the
publisher. The publisher then packages a bunch of papers together and sells them
back to the research community in the form of a journal subscription. While
publishers undoubtedly add some value to the end product, researchers do most
of the work — not just in authoring the papers in the first place, but also in
peer reviewing their colleagues’ papers (without charge). Yet, as any librarian
will tell you, subscription charges are inexcusably high, and getting higher
each year.

In
short, publishers are overcharging for scholarly journals. And since it is they
who pay the bills, it was librarians who first sounded the alarm. However,
since the costs do not come from their budgets, and journals are made available
in institutions on a free-at-the-point-of-use basis, most researchers have been
unaware of the seriousness of the problem. For their part, publishers have
consistently denied that they are
overcharging.

Why
are journals so expensive? They are expensive for a number of reasons, but
mainly because there is a disconnect in the scholarly journal market: that is,
the people who pay the journal subscriptions are not the people who use the
journals. As we shall see, this means that there is no effective market
mechanism to control prices.

And
as the number of papers published continues to grow, and libraries face ever
greater pressure on their budgets, so the struggle to provide faculty with
access to all the papers they need has become ever more serious. This phenomenon
is now generally referred to as the “serials crisis”.

As
I hope will become apparent, it helps to see the serials crisis as a
double-headed problem. As libraries are forced to cancel more and more journals
each year, researchers face a growing accessibility
problem. However, this accessibility
problem is merely a symptom of the deeper problem — what one might call the affordability problem. The key challenge,
of course, is to find a solution.

Open Access

Over
the years various solutions to the serials crisis have been proposed. However, the
one that has gained the greatest mindshare is Open Access (OA). And it is no surprise that
librarians played a key role in the development of the OA movement — not least
by co-founding the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) in 1998, and
constantly promoting the merits of OA.

Essentially,
advocates for OA argue that all published research can and should be made
freely available on the Web, either by means of green OA, in which
researchers continue to publish in subscription journals but then self-archive
their papers in their institutional
repository
(usually after an embargo period so that publishers can recover their costs),
or by means of gold OA, in which
researchers (or more usually their funders) pay publishers an
article-processing charge (APC) to ensure that their paper is
made freely available on the Web at the time of publication. The latter can be achieved
either by publishing in an OA journal (the entire contents of which are made
freely available), or in a hybrid journal (a
subscription journal in which individual papers can be made OA if the author
pays an APC).

Concluding
that Open Access offered a viable solution to the double-headed problem facing
the research community, Shieber began to advocate for OA at Harvard ...

####

If you wish to read the interview with Stuart Shieber, please click on the link below.

I
am publishing the interview under a Creative Commons licence, so
you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you
credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do
not use it for any commercial purpose.

Tuesday, November 06, 2012

From the moment it was conceived, PubMed Central was
controversial, and it has remained controversial ever since. The brainchild of Harold Varmus — the then
director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the idea
for PubMed Central was first mooted in 1999, but originally called E-BIOMED.

Kent Anderson

When Varmus published his initial proposal, publishers
quickly concluded that it posed a serious threat to their livelihoods.
Specifically, they were convinced that, if E-BIOMED went ahead, the US
government would become a publisher, and they would be disintermediated as a
result. So they launched a firestorm of protest.

Their protest delivered results. When the service was
launched eight months later it had been re-branded as PubMed Central, and was a pale shadow of the revolutionary new “electronic
publications” system that Varmus had envisioned. Significantly, Varmus had had
to concede that publishers would have final say on whether the papers they
published were put into PubMed Central — and most publishers chose not to
participate.

Varmus later conceded that he had been naïve not to have
anticipated the furore. “I must have known that I was not going to be at NIH
for much longer,” he joked to New Scientist in 2003, “because this
caused a tremendous political argument: what the hell was I trying to do to destroy
the publication industry.”

Nevertheless, it was soon apparent that NIH did not
intend to give up on its dream of having a large free full-text archive of
biomedical and life science papers, along the lines of the physics preprint
server arXiv. This resolve was only strengthened when, two years
later, the Open Access (OA) movement came into being. The tide of
history, it seemed, was flowing in NIH’s direction.

One again, publishers objected. In a 2004 editorial
penned in the Chemical & Engineering
News, for instance, C&N Editor-in-Chief Rudy Baumcomplained,
“Zerhouni’s action is the opening salvo in the open-access movement's unstated,
but clearly evident, goal of placing responsibility for the entire scientific
enterprise in the federal government's hand. Open access, in fact, equates with
socialized science.”

For publishers the nightmare scenario was that
research funders would gradually squeeze them out of the process of
disseminating research. After all, the papers published in scholarly journals
are written by researchers, and the peer review process is conducted by
researchers — at no charge to publishers. In the age of the Internet, some were
beginning to conclude, the need for publishers was beginning to look moot. At
the very least, they reasoned, the role that publishers play could be reduced in
an online world. This would help ease the burden on the public purse, which many
believed was being gouged by publishers charging excessive journal prices.

But this time publisher opposition did not succeed. In
May 2005 the NIH introduced its Public Access
Policy. While this was initially only a request that researchers
post NIH-funded papers in PubMed Central, it was later upgraded to a demand,
and today researchers are required “to submit all final peer-reviewed journal
manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication.”

Publishers continued to mutter about the Public Access
Policy, but they had to learn to live with it. And faced with growing calls for
research papers to be made freely available, many also began to experiment with
OA.

But last year their fears of being disintermediated were
reignited, when three large research funders — the Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Max-Planck Society — announced plans to launch their own OA journal, eLife.

Since the funders indicated that they would not initially
be charging a publication fee, publishers complained that it was
anti-competitive. Writing on the Nature
newsblog on the day of the announcement, for instance, Nature’sDeclan Butlercommented, “[F]rom
what we know so far from today’s press conference, this new journal appears to
offer few tangible novel innovations and may indeed disrupt the thriving open
access environment. Its decision not to charge author fees, at least in the
journal’s short and medium term, in fact could risk setting back the cause of
open-access publishing by undermining — through what might be considered unfair
competition — economically successful open access publishers”.

And when at the end of October, eLife announced that it had published its first few articles, critics were angered to see that the papers had been hosted not on the
journal’s own website, but on PubMed Central.

Sunday, October 28, 2012

Like
all successful movements, Open Access (OA) has experienced a number of
milestone events. Amongst the more significant of these were the creation of
the physics preprint repository arXiv in 1991, the
1994 Subversive
Proposal,
the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), and the
introduction in 2005 of the first Open Access
Policy
of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The
2004 Inquiry was remarkable for a number of reasons, not least the way in which
it managed to explore a deeply divisive issue in an independent and fair-minded
way, despite intense lobbying from all sides.

This
independence was all the more striking given that the Inquiry was itself a
response to lobbying by OA publishers, origins that gave rise to a great deal
of paranoid speculation.

On
discovering that the Inquiry was a product of behind-the-scenes agitation by OA
publishers, for instance, subscription publishers became extremely jumpy, fearful
that it could lead to government intervention that would impact negatively on
their profits. In their turn, OA advocates became increasingly concerned that
the Select Committee did not
understand
the issues, and that the Inquiry was therefore in the process of being “captured” by
subscription publishers.

The
widening suspicion led to a great many rumours and conspiracy theories. When
publishing consultant David Worlock was appointed
as “specialist adviser” to the Committee, for instance, OA advocates assumed
that his appointment had been masterminded by subscription publishers, with the
aim of ensuring that the Committee ended up concluding that the status quo
should not be disrupted.

What
those outside the Committee and its support staff did not know, however, was
that Worlock’s appointment was in part a tactical move intended to act as a
counterweight to the fact that the Inquiry had been triggered by lobbying from OA
publishers. Likewise, they did not know that another (more OA friendly)
specialist had been interviewed for the position, but that the Committee had been
more impressed by Worlock.

Those
caught up in the rumour mill also failed to appreciate that the role of a specialist
adviser is not to provide opinions, draw conclusions, or write reports, but solely
to offer insights and contacts based on their expertise.

In
this case, it was felt necessary to appoint an adviser because the Committee members
had no personal experience of the publishing industry. As such, they needed
someone with the necessary knowledge to answer the practical questions that
they had about it.

When
recruiting advisers, select committee staff consult with in-house specialists, and
then call up people in the field to ask for suggestions.

Monday, October 01, 2012

A
Q&A with co-architect of the Big Deal Jan Velterop follows this
introduction

The
scholarly communication system has been in serious difficulties for several
decades now, a problem generally referred to as the “serials crisis”. The nub
of the issue is that the price of scholarly journals has consistently risen faster
than the consumer price index. This has seen research libraries increasingly
struggle to meet the costs of subscribing to all the journals their researchers
need.

In
the early 1990s, publishers found themselves in a situation where every time they
increased the price of a journal they were confronted with a wave of
cancellations. In an attempt to recover the lost revenue they would raise the price
again, which simply triggered another round of cancellations.

Conscious
that their livelihood was under threat, publishers cast around for a way to
lock subscribers in, eventually coming up with what became known as the “Big
Deal”.

Academic Press Big Deal contract

With
the Big Deal, libraries are asked not to subscribe to journals on a
title-by-title basis, but to a pre-determined bundle of electronic journals,
which they have to commit to for several years. Usually this bundle consists of
the publisher’s entire portfolio, which might include hundreds of titles.

The
attraction of the Big Deal for the publisher was that it promised to end the
annual cancellation cycle. For libraries it provided access to a much larger
number of titles for the same price as they had been paying for a smaller set —
so long as they took the entire bundle, and so long as they signed a multi-year
contract. For authors it provided a larger and more stable audience for their
articles.

The
Big Deal was pioneered in 1996 by Academic Press (now part of Elsevier), when it signed
a three-year licensing contract with the Higher Education Funding Council for
England (HEFCE). The
agreement meant that anyone working in a higher education (HE) institution in
the UK got free-at-the-point-of-use access to AP’s entire journal portfolio.
Moreover, since it was HEFCE that paid the bill (by means of top slicing), the
deal brought the additional benefit of easing the pressure on the budgets of hard-pressed
UK research libraries.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Founded in
1997, Hindawi Publishing Corporation was the first subscription publisher to
convert its entire portfolio of journals to Open Access (OA). This has
enabled the company to grow very rapidly and today it publishes over 400 OA
journals.

The speed of Hindawi’s growth, which included creating many new
journals in a short space of time and mass mailing researchers, led to
suspicion that it was a “predatory” organisation. Today, however, most of its detractors
have been won round and — bar the occasional hiccup — Hindawi is viewed as a
respectable and responsible publisher.

Nevertheless, Hindawi’s story poses a
number of questions. First, how do researchers distinguish between good and bad
publishers in today’s Internet-fuelled publishing revolution, and what
constitutes acceptable practice anyway? Second, does today’s Western-centric
publishing culture tend to discriminate against publishers based in the
developing world? Third, might the author-side payment model fast becoming the
norm in OA publishing turn out to be flawed? Finally, can we expect OA
publishing to prove less expensive than subscription publishing? If not, what
are the implications?

These at least were some of the questions that occurred
to me during my interview with Ahmed Hindawi.

Ahmed Hindawi

Ambition

After
training in (and briefly teaching) High Energy Physics, Ahmed Hindawi decided
he wanted to become a scholarly publisher — an ambition sparked by the advent
of the Internet, his experience using the physics pre-print server arXiv, and a newly-acquired
passion for typography.

Inspired
by this dream, Hindawi and his wife Nagwa Abdel-Mottaleb returned from the US
to their native country of Egypt and founded Hindawi Publishing Corporation. From
the start they set their sights high, determined to “make a dent in the
universe” by leveraging the potential of the Web to “disrupt the scholarly
communications industry”.

Becoming
a player in the scholarly publishing market was at that time, however, no walk
in the park — not least because the subscription model traditionally used to
publish scholarly journals had enabled a few large publishers to acquire
near-monopoly powers.

Nevertheless,
after several false starts, Hindawi and his wife did gain a foothold, taking
over publication of the International
Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences (IJMMS) in 1999.

Big
break

Hindawi’s
big break came in 2001 — when he made a daring bid to acquire the journal International Mathematics Research Notices
(IMRN) from Duke University Press. Lacking the
wherewithal to buy the journal outright, Hindawi proposed an instalment plan
and, to his delight, Duke accepted his proposal. “This was the most significant journal acquisition that we had made
up to that point, and it doubled our annual revenue,” says Hindawi.

Now established as a
traditional scholarly publisher, Hindawi found himself increasingly
frustrated with the limitations of the subscription system. Not only does it
make it difficult for new entrants to break into the market, but it inevitably
erects a paywall between reader and author, and so significantly limits the
potential audience. As a result, many subscription journals have only a handful
of subscribers. “[W]e were very
concerned about the readership of these
journals,” says Hindawi. “It just didn’t feel right to call this publishing.”

So
the publisher began experimenting with ways to make the research that he
published available sans paywall,
including inviting authors to pay a publication fee so that their papers could
be made freely available on the Internet — a model that later came to be known
as hybrid Open
Access
(OA).

By
2004, however, the pioneering OA publishers BioMed Central (BMC) and Public Library of Science (PLoS) had
demonstrated that it was possible to build a viable publishing business from
so-called gold OA.
So Hindawi made the decision to convert his entire portfolio of journals to gold
OA, a process completed by 2007 ...

####

If you wish to read the interview with Ahmed Hindawi, please click on the link below.

I
am publishing the interview under a Creative Commons licence, so
you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you
credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do
not use it for any commercial purpose.